Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Jer,” said Kelly, “I wouldn’t talk too much about those exploding gophers. What if terrorists find out that they can use fat alcoholic gophers as weapons?”

  Jerry grinned. “Gopher grenades,” he said.

  “Gopher cocktails.”

  Jerry’s eyes widened in imitation awe. “The G-bomb,” he said, his voice breathless. Kelly burst out in giggles.

  Loren looked down at his plate and realized he’d left his waffle untouched. He took a bite, chewed slowly, then turned toward the kitchen, where Debra was making more waffles. Kelly was still fighting her fit of giggles.

  “The waffles are wonderful!” he shouted.

  “Thank you!”

  “Heard you got a body,” said Jerry.

  “Did . . . it . . .blow up?” Kelly asked, her words popping out from around bursts of giggles.

  Loren put down his fork. “Not at table,” he said. “No politics, no police business.”

  “Sorry,” said Jerry. “Forgot.”

  “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “Frank Sanchez took me west last night.”

  “And what did he say?”

  Jerry shrugged. “Not much.” He looked at Loren. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  Debra returned from the kitchen with a new plate of waffles. “No police business,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” said Jerry.

  The Roberts family was not present this morning, but there was another specter haunting the church steps.

  “Loren,” said Mack Bonniwell, “I need to talk to you.”

  Bonniwell stood on the steps of the church, gazing angrily at Loren from behind black-rimmed spectacles. His expression was grim.

  “Let’s make it quick,” Loren said. He gestured for his family to continue on into the church. “Get a pew,” he said. “We’re late.”

  “When you called the other night, you said you’d had to arrest my kid,” Bonniwell said. “You didn’t say you’d beat the pulp out of him.”

  “I hit him twice,” Loren said. “That’s not beating the pulp out of anybody.”

  “You kicked a seventeen-year-old kid in the crotch,” Bonniwell said, “and you yanked his ears half off and kneed him in the face and broke his nose. That’s pretty goddamned brutal if you ask me.”

  Loren looked into the church. “The service is about to start.”

  “I don’t give a shit, Hawn,” Bonniwell said.

  Loren turned to him. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this. “A.J. had a gun,” he said.

  “My kid didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t see whether your kid did or not. I had to take him out.”

  “You’re a bully, Loren Hawn!” Bonniwell stood very close. Loren flinched from the spittle that landed on his face. “You always were a bully, even back in school! I remember how you used to push other kids around! Sneak around, find out their secrets, then confront them when they were at a disadvantage!”

  Heat flickered over Loren’s skin. “Are you finished?” he said. He looked left and right to see if latecomers were in view. The church choir began to sing.

  “That badge doesn’t allow you to knock my family around!” Bonniwell screamed. “It doesn’t allow—”

  There didn’t seem to be anyone looking. Loren slapped Bonniwell hard in the face. Bonniwell fell silent, eyes wide in stunned surprise. If the guy made a move, Loren intended to drive an elbow into his face and then sweep his feet. Dump him on the church steps and secure him.

  No move was made.

  “Shut your dentures, Mack,” Loren said, trying to keep his voice low, “and listen very carefully. If your kid had a gun, and if I’d given him a chance to use it, your kid would be facing death row right now, because if he killed an officer he’d be tried as an adult, okay? Now, if I were you—”

  “You’re not me, thank God—” Bonniwell seemed to have found his tongue again.

  “If I were you,” patiently, “I’d just shut my mouth and pay the fine and tell my kid not to hang with trash, okay?”

  “I’m going to complain,” Bonniwell said. “You can’t get away with this.”

  “There’s a procedure for complaint, okay,” Loren said. “You can follow it if you want. But let me point out that Judge Denver won’t want this business reopened since he’s already given a sentence, and he might just revoke your kid’s probation and make him do time, and—”

  “Are you threatening my son?” Bonniwell’s voice was raised again.

  “I’m telling you what’ll happen. Nothing more.”

  “Hitting me on the church steps! Threatening my kid! I’m not going to forget this, Hawn.”

  “I hope you don’t. Because—”

  “I’m not interested in what you’ve got to say, you goddamned bully.”

  Loren looked him in the eye. “Walk away from it, Mack.”

  Mack stared at him for a long time, fists clenched, within a centimeter of violence, and then he turned and walked into the church.

  Loren took a few deep breaths as he turned angry little circles on the porch, then headed into the big church and sat down with his family.

  Last time he’d ever do an old friend a favor, he thought. Next time he’d just see the kid was tossed in jail and forgotten.

  He contemplated, in some detail, breaking several of Bonniwell’s bones. The details were graphic and very pleasant.

  It totally escaped him now why he’d been so reasonable during the confrontation.

  “I had a sermon already written out!” Pastor Rickey proclaimed. He pronounced the last word owt.” And then I saw last night’s news on the TV and threw the whole darn thing away!” Dahrn.

  “You’re grinding your teeth,” Debra said.

  Loren glanced up in surprise. He’d forgotten where he was.

  “That sermon was a good one, too!” Rickey said. “Maybe I’ll impart it next year.”

  There were chuckles from his audience. Loren wondered blindly what the pastor was talking about.

  “Because on the news last night was a perfect example of why gluttony is considered a Deadly Sin, as opposed to some less significant kind.”

  The pastor lowered his voice, becoming intimate. “I only know what I saw on the news,“ he said, “and since this is a legal matter I want to give you a caution here. I only know what I saw. I don’t know that the people charged are guilty, and since some of you may serve as jurors someday, I want to remind you that you don’t know, either.”

  Uh-huh, Loren thought. This was getting interesting.

  “But if the news reports are correct,” Rickey said, “then what this community has experienced is a cascade of sin, one leading to another.

  “The first was gluttony.” Raising a finger. “Not gluttony in its ordinary sense, but gluttony in the sense of a craving for drugs. Drugs are not simply bad for you— drugs are sinful! I want to make that clear!”

  Rickey banged a fist on his pulpit. Loren watched with increasing interest. This guy might make a preacher yet.

  “Drugs are sinful because they make you turn away from God! Just as excess pride makes you turn away from the Lord, so drugs make you care abowt nothing but yourself and your own craving! God’s mercy is the only answer— there are no answers in chemicals!

  “So that was the first sin— gluttony for drugs. And because of their gluttony— that Deadly Sin— the people who use drugs don’t much care where the drugs come from. And because they don’t care, they encourage their suppliers not to care much, either.”

  Rickey leaned back on his stool and took a long breath. “So the gluttony for drugs led to a demand for drugs that led to a robbery in order to get the cash to buy drugs! Now, about how many sins have we got so far?” Rickey held up a fist and stuck out a finger. “Theft— that’s against the Commandments!” A second finger. “Pride, because they thought they could get away with it. Covetousness of money and drugs— that’s another Deadly Sin.” Fingers kept rising till he was working on
his second hand. “Envy of those who had money— Deadly Sin again! And anger, a Deadly Sin, because they had to be angry to do their part in the robbery and point guns at people in the first place and steal all their dollars.” Dahlers. “All because of gluttony, which doesn’t seem like much of a sin until you think about it.”

  After the service, Loren walked down the aisle feeling as if he were on fire. He had broken this web of crime and evil, ended the cascade of sin, crushed the ringleader with the Lord’s name on his lips. He shook Pastor Rickey’s hand.

  “That was the best sermon I’ve ever heard you give,” he said.

  Rickey smiled. “Thank you. People always seem to pay more attention when you talk about current events.”

  “You tied the current events to God.”

  “I heard you got a body.” Rickey peered at Loren through rimless spectacles. “Any luck at finding out who did it?”

  Loren felt the fire inside him leap higher. Was the Almighty looking at him through those spectacles? “We’re in the middle of things right now,” he said. “But I’ll be working on it today.”

  “Good luck,” said Rickey.

  Sword and arm of the Lord, Loren thought.

  Time to get to work.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Loren bounced up the steps of the City-County Building three at a time. Splotches of dried blood marred the white tile just inside the door. Loren moved past the mess and found Cipriano in his office. The assistant chief was listening to a pre-football sports program on the radio and doing paperwork. A book about the New Mexico Water War lay open, facedown, by his hand. He looked up at Loren’s knock.

  “What’s up, pachuco?”

  “Nothing new, jefe,” he said. “Begley’s taking the cargo of drugs to Albuquerque. Chip Lone from the mortuary is taking the body to the Albuquerque medical investigator’s office at the same time.”

  “Good,” Loren said. “Anything from Jernigan or Patience?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any idea why Patience is taking such an interest?”

  Cipriano shrugged. “Because he’s an asshole, jefe.” He looked up and grinned. “And he’s not even a half-competent asshole. They’ve found cattle wandering around their security areas down there.”

  “Cattle at ATL?” Loren was delighted by the thought. “Cattle got past those cameras and through alarmed chain link fences?”

  “That’s what Begley said. He goes shooting with one of their security guys, and the guy told him they run across cows every so often. They’re so embarrassed the cows got through security that they just shoot them and bury them right there on the facility.”

  “Waste of good beef.”

  “That’s what I thought. Oh.” Cipriano looked surprised. “I forgot something. That-weasel-the-mayor wants you to call him.”

  Loren felt his good mood start to slide away. “What did he want?” he asked.

  “Guess.”

  Loren sighed and went to his office to call the mayor. He used the speed dial for the mayor’s mobile phone and caught him just as he was setting off for the town’s nine-hole golf course.

  ”I wanted to talk about that body you found,” Trujillo said.

  “That body more or less found me, Ed.”

  “Any idea who the guy was?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Or who did it?”

  Loren cleared his throat. “Same answer.”

  “Because the city can’t afford a big investigation. The way I look at it, if no one knows who the body was, nobody’s going to get upset if we don’t go out of our way—”

  “He looked like a local to me. There are a few of the ten thousand people in this county that I don’t know by sight. And that body didn’t drive very far, Ed. Someone in this county, maybe even in town, pulled the trigger.”

  Trujillo’s voice demonstrated an exaggerated patience. “What about the last body, Loren?”

  A cold wave of guilt poured like ice water down Loren’s back. “That was different,” he said.

  “I don’t see how.”

  Two years ago the county cops had found a dead man in the trunk of a car. He’d been killed by someone who had emptied a .45 automatic into the trunk. He’d been dead a week, and a television news helicopter hovering over the scene blew most of the evidence away in the propwash. After that Shorty lost the rest of the evidence, including the murder weapon, just in the act of getting it from the crime scene to his office. Probably one of his men ripped the gun off for a souvenir. There was no ID on the body and the car had been stolen in Boston fourteen months earlier, so no leads there. The crime was most likely drug-related and probably had nothing to do with anyone in the county.

  “You and Shorty ruled that one suicide,” the mayor said.

  Loren cleared his throat again. Guilt bounced around in his skull like a rocketing rubber ball.

  “The coroner ruled it suicide,” he said. “And there’s a difference, Ed.”

  “I don’t see any essential difference. A stranger killed in a stolen car.”

  “The difference is that the guy didn’t die of gunshot wounds right in police headquarters, Ed. It’s kind of hard for us to ignore it under the circumstances.”

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the efforts of your department, Loren. Don’t misunderstand me there.”

  Loren frowned at his BUY AMERICAN sign. “I understand you perfectly well, Ed,” he said.

  “But we’ve got to store the drugs in Albuquerque, and we’ve got a bill from the mortuary—”

  “You’d get that in any case, Ed. Whether we investigate or not.”

  “—plus we have to bear the costs of transporting your body to Albuquerque for an autopsy, and maybe burying it when it gets there.”

  “If we find any next of kin, that last will be their problem.”

  “If they’re solvent. I have no confidence in that.”

  “Ed, there ain’t much we can do about any of these things. It’s our job to do all this.”

  Trujillo paused for a moment. “Could you just keep the overtime to a reasonable amount?”

  Loren smiled. “I’ll do my best, Ed,” he said.

  He called the Hiawatha and asked for Amardas Singh. The sleepy voice that answered the phone had an accent far more Californian than Pakistani; Singh said he would be happy to talk to the officers if he could just take a shower first.

  Before he left, Loren made a point of charging the battery in the recorder.

  The Hiawatha was a U-shaped two-story motel that, like the Geronimo bar, featured a giant feathered Indian of green and red neon. Cipriano drove under the waving, flickering tomahawk and into the parking lot. He pulled up next to an Infiniti sedan that featured a bumper sticker reading HEISENBERG SLEPT HERE OR SOMEWHERE ELSE NEARBY.

  More physicist humor, apparently.

  Loren got out of the passenger seat and looked for a long moment at the neon Indian.

  “Why Hiawatha?” he wondered suddenly. “Didn’t Hiawatha live in Minnesota or something? Why not an Indian from around here?”

  Cipriano knocked on Singh’s door without giving the neon Indian a glance. “Tourists wouldn’t understand if this place was named after Mangas Coloradas,” he said.

  “I guess.”

  “Maybe they should name it after Heisenberg. Whoever he was.”

  Loren ambled to the door just as it opened and stared at the room’s inhabitant in surprise.

  Like the man Loren had seen the night before, this man was big and dark-complected; but unlike the turbaned figure Loren remembered, this character had a wiry beard reaching almost to his navel and long pepper-and-salt hair that hung almost as far. Give him a bed of nails and a robe instead of his T-shirt, jeans, and moccasins, and he could have passed for a guru on his way to pick up some converts among the rich and fashionable people who had, in recent decades, occupied Santa Fe in much the same fashion, and with more or less the same attitude, that the U.S. Cavalry had once occupied hostile Indian coun
try.

  “Hello,” the man said. “I am Amardas Singh. Please come in, sirs.”

  Despite the somewhat formal language, this was still the Californian voice Loren had heard on the phone. The room smelled of fresh coffee. Loren and Cipriano took the two plastic seats available. “Would you like some French roast?” Singh said. “I just made some.”

  Both accepted. Singh poured from a portable plastic coffeemaker that he had obviously brought with him. Loren noticed, as Singh handed him his cup, that the man had a steel bracelet on his wrist. Singh sat down on a print bedspread with a fake Navajo design. He smoothed the pattern and looked at it with a smile.

  “I remember this pattern from Pakistan,” he said. “Odd to see it here in the western U.S.”

  Loren looked at it. “Looks Navajo to me,” he said.

  Singh shrugged. The gesture looked odd in a bushy-haired exotic. “I suppose the pattern could have been developed independently.” He turned back to Loren. “Dr. Jernigan said you would call.”

  “I suppose he told you why.”

  “He said you would wish me to verify his movements.”

  “If you could.” Loren sipped the coffee. It had been made with the hard tap water and tasted dreadful. Waste of good beans.

  “Do you mind if we record this?” he asked.

  “Please go ahead, sir.”

  “Could you give your full name for the record?” Starting the recorder.

  “Amardas N.M.I. Singh.”

  Amusement trickled through Loren. N.M.I.: no middle initial. Singh must have got used to official interviews during his years of dealing with Immigration.

  Loren spoke into the recorder. “This is an interview with Amardas N.M.I. Singh, commencing at ten-forty A.M. Interviewing officers are Loren Hawn and Cipriano Dominguez.” He looked up at Singh. “Birthplace?”

  “New Delhi, India.”

  Loren frowned. “Someone told me you were Pakistani.”

  “I was born in India. My grandparents were killed by Hindus in a riot when I was three, and my surviving family fled to Rawalpindi, in Pakistan.”

  The words were matter-of-fact, said with a slight smile. Loren tried to picture Atocha divided along those kinds of bitter ethnic lines, with Apostles battling the LDS over their varying interpretations of early Mormon history, and armed Knights of Columbus cruising the plaza armed with shotguns, blasting Baptist heretics with iron pellets…